Long Tale Press

-1-

AN EASY MARK

The girl wearing the Salvation Army uniform held out the collection plate almost shamefacedly, avoiding his gaze, looking at nothing; beyond him, around him, way off into the darkening sky; quite plainly at nothing. He had never much liked the idea of Salvation Army people standing in front of liquor stores anyway. There was something cheap and hateful about it, as if their whole aim was to prey on the guilt of Baptist deacons and Presbyterian elders who mistakenly thought that they could make their clandestine purchases and sneak away anonymously into the gathering twilight.

The way Ryerson Hezekiah Moffit Goode handled it, he always came out of the store with a long and studied pause, counting his change ostentatiously before cramming it all in his pocket. Ha! No nice shiny coin this time! He looked at her again, pausing longer than usual. Something in the her eyes—or rather in the way she kept refusing to look at him directly—called forth a new strategy: he turned after a moment's hesitation and dropped a quarter in her collection cup

Their eyes met as she nodded her thanks. Then off they went again, toward the street traffic and the jostling crowds. By his guess she was only a little younger than he was, barely out of her teens, and from the sly almost wanton look on her face, no more innocent. What was she doing there anyway, draped in black, with the red hatband around her hat, and the obnoxious collection cup in her hand? To Ryerson she didn't look anything like the kind of girl who would stoop to collecting hush money.

That same afternoon, as he wandered the streets from which a recent snowfall had been a long time vanishing, he saw her again; this time at a collection booth near Fourth and Trade. He watched her from a narrow alley that ran between two department stores. She stood a little away from the kettle, ringing the bell softly, almost mechanically, again staring off into nothingness. Then he saw the other one: a thumpingly fat Salvation Army officer whose loud merry voice sent shudders of disgust through Ryerson Goode.

"God bless you, brother! God go with you!"

A pushy fellow indeed, relentlessly pacing the sidewalk, jangling his heavy bell and boisterously accosting the Christmas shoppers.

Ryerson despised him instantly.

"God go with you, brother. But let us not forget those who are less fortunate than we!"

It was getting late and much colder now as the crowds began to thin out. What a marvelous opportunity! Another hour or so and he would easily be able to take the obnoxious character down for the count. He would come up behind the man and strike him with great viciousness and then stand there laughing as his victim sunk to the pavement in a soggy lump. He would grab all of those dollar bills from the hanging kettle and escape cleanly down the dark alley.

Ah, yes, a truly marvelous coup! Then he would make for the public library and sit for a while contemplating a copy of Aristotle's Ethics or Aurelius's Meditations until the cops gave up looking for him. All that money and no one the wiser. Instead, he dropped a quarter and two dimes into the kettle and hastened up the street, the captain's bell clangorous behind him, his voice oppressive—

--God go with you, stranger. God provide you with every earthly comfort.--

Ryerson knew it was only some residue of Baptist right-thinking that kept him from carrying out his merciless assault. No matter. The man himself wasn't important. Nor was the girl. Why was it he kept thinking about her face, those eyes? Had he known her somewhere in a dim and mysterious past, before she decided to prostitute herself on the altar of Christian sanctity, a popular priestly tradition in Old Testament days and one of the really progressive ideas that modern America had not seen fit to pursue. A lot of things the preachers hadn’t told him about those early Israelites, and all of those old Gnostics.

The next day he found her alone at the booth. He dropped in another quarter and paused briefly to talk, explaining his unkempt appearance—threadbare overcoat, unshaven face—as that of a young man who, having been born to wealth, now chose to go about the streets incognito, so that he might seek out those most worthy to receive his bounty. The story brought a flush to her cheek, a smile; and then suddenly she was almost laughing, a deep throaty chuckle that convinced him all over again of her tainted innocence.

"Where do you stay?" he asked.

"At the mission house, of course. We all do. We have a series of very nice services planned for Christmas week. Will we see you there? We do have visitors from time to time."

The success of his first lie had decided him on another: he was, he explained, a writer and lyric poet of note and had recently published a collection of verse in the Antioch Review and American Scholar.

"My, that sounds very impressive!"

"The reviews have been excellent."

“I certainly wish you every success—in all of your endeavors.”

He thought about all the times he had sent out the collections of verse, the rejection slips. Never a personal note of encouragement. During all of his infamous career he had received only one personal rejection: a snotty note from some asshole of an editor at a literary magazine he had never heard of until he came across it in Writer's Market. "Sorry," the guy had written. "This is not meat for Red Dust." Ry got out an old piece of moldy baloney, urinated on it and stuck it in an envelope with his own note :"Here, you crummy bastards! Here is meat for Red Dust!"

Small satisfaction in that, except, well, he might as well face the truth, it was beginning to look as if it were all he would ever receive. --To hell with those goddamn bastards to hell with them goddamn-- Yet everything he told the girl might have been true if all those bastards in the publishing world were not purposely denying him his rightful place as an up-and-coming writer of the New South.

He hurried on, promising to remember her invitation to the Christmas services. Across the street he stopped and looked back, and saw that she had again dropped into the melancholy mood from which he had briefly rescued her: the same downcast look and timid gaze. A look that would haunt him for days. Why? Maybe because of some secret fascination with women whose good looks lay in understatement; women disdainful of makeup, pale and wasted with hidden desire.

Yet that had never been true of Deni, the great love of his life. His own half-sister, from whom he had been separated almost since birth, child of his father’s first marriage, an adventuresome dark-haired girl with a taint of wild Cherokee blood in her coloring, in the haunting beauty of her face.

She only came into his life as a teenager; and who would ever have believed what wildly lustful episodes had come from those encounters! All the laughter and crying, all the good times that had brought her to ultimate despair: an abortion, a miscarriage, many weeks and even months in bed, with her vowing never to see him again --simply because we can’t don’t you see Ryerson simply because we can’t-- and to repent her great sin at the altar of a God in whom she seldom, if ever, confided.

She always came back, no matter how often she assured him that they “couldn’t go on like this,” and in the end fled with him to Florida on a mad impulse destined [as she was forever reminding him] to destroy them both. She had given up everything, home, family, graduate studies; everything she hoped to make of her life for no other reason than to enjoy an insanely passionate romance with him in a place called Point Cypress, a lost coastal town now being swallowed by the South Florida swamplands.

-2-

FLIGHT

The letter that was to change their lives forever had reached him toward the end of the summer after his graduation from college, more than five years ago now, on the very day he was preparing to climb in his car and go racing out of Old Winston to a new life in the West.

California! That was where the future was. He was to begin work within the month on a small Southern California daily, where his college chum Lincoln Stearns had gone to work two months earlier as a special feature writer.

The surprising part was that in spite of everything, his anger, his hesitancy to return home now that his father was dead, he was suddenly anxious to see his old town again, anxious to smell the good raw smell of tobacco drifting up from the cigarette factories, anxious even to see the old house on New Poplar, yet dreading it all the same, driving by it half a dozen times that very day before deciding not to go in no not now not yet wishing he had gone on through the town without stopping and turned onto the long highway west.

Yes. California. Where the good life was. Would he be able to forget Deni in California? Would he ever be able to forget the look on her face that last night at the --Santa Lucia?--

Lincoln had said that there were at least two openings at the news shop where he was working. Still, Ryerson would need the money his mother had locked away for him “in trust” and would have to figure out some lie to persuade her he had changed for the better his whole dastardly attitude toward life.

He knew his father had left more than enough for his mother to live comfortably for the rest of his life and enough for him to make an awfully good start. His big job would be to charm her long enough, to make her forget herself and her illness long enough, to persuade her somehow to open up the lockbox and hand over enough cash to see him through his long, hot trip to the West. A hundred dollars, two-hundred, whatever he could talk her out of.

It would never work. He could never get that much without arousing her suspicions. “You need all that just to go to Raleigh for a job interview?” she would ask. He could not possibly disclose his real plans. Any mention of California always sent her spinning off into a new state of melancholy even though, as a schoolgirl, she had spent some of her best days there.

He knew if he could somehow get there he would have a good chance at landing the kind of job he wanted. He had a good sampling of his work, mostly news clippings he had brought back from Florida, about all he had brought back except for half a dozen paperbacks or so and some random scribblings he had grabbed up at the last moment. Maybe the clippings would create a bit of a stir at the LA Times and win him a high-paying job writing special features or maybe investigating Mexican whorehouses while Lincoln was still stuck in Santa Monica.

He could write home later and explain why he’d not found a satisfactory outlet for his genius in Raleigh. The letter from Deni had changed everything. He had never expected her to be so open with him, not after she had so often insisted they could not continue to see each other in the old way. --And goddamnit why was it so hard for him to understand they would simply have to go back to being mere brother and sister again?--

He knew he had no right to try and argue her into something she would be sure to hold over him for the rest of their lives. So much of it was his fault. Crazy, she always said. Of herself as well as of him. Just too goddamn crazy. Yet he never felt crazy. And she’d been ever the temptress, the flirt, even with all of her interest in literature and history, her profound knowledge of the French language and French history, her own [and his] direct lineage from Charlemagne, the Plantagenets, the blue bloods of Virginia and a whole slew of earls, counts, barons and courtiers too various to name. Why did people always seem so unimpressed to learn that of him?

He knew there had been nasty talk in the family, rumors of something a little odd going on between him and Deni; and once, during the summer before his senior year in high school he was sure their little affair was the talk of all Dobbs Station, the old train stop that had been and still was the site of their grandfather’s farm. --Mountain trash that’s all just plain old mountain trash--

Even so, he did not guess the extent of what was known until the day he was leaving for California, the very day he got her letter. His own mother, with the often startling perception of the mentally deranged, had grown suspicious of his infamous affair long before the gossipmongers started in on her.

Then came the incriminating letter she had “opened by mistake.” He was afraid the proof of what she had long suspected would put her back in the mental institution

for sure, the mountain “rest home,” as the family called it, where she had spent so

much of her adult life.

“Damn you,” she said. “That whore you claim for a sister. May her soul rot in Hell! And may you live to see this terrible fate you have brought upon yourself!”

He had always insisted, and did so still, that they were only friends, with a relationship that most half-brothers and sisters separated since birth would be proud to boast of. The letter was nothing. He was merely to meet her for dinner in Raleigh before interviewing for a job at the --Biblical Recorder,-- an unblinking fundamentalist Baptist publication and, next to --Better Homes & Gardens,-- his mother’s favorite reading material. He could be quite convincing when he found need to lie with fervor, but he was sure that with her remarkable perception she had never for a moment truly believed a single word.

He might have expected a bit more tolerance. She was always reading about such misdeeds in one or another of those old English novels that filled her bookshelves. Yet when it was her own son about to be burnt at the stake, and with the laws and customs having changed so much since the days of which those early novelists wrote—well, what was one to think other than what she had always known: that he was suffering a serious contamination from some of the “really rotten blood” he had inherited from his mountain forebears. All of it coming down in his father’s side of the family, she said. “And don’t let anyone tell you different.”

"Don't you know people are always talking of Southerners as though we were nothing but trash," she told him as he stood on the porch with his going-away bags in his hands. "The kind of people who marry their own sisters and brothers and take liberties with their sons and daughters. If I really thought she goaded you into this—if I really could bring myself to believe she was as lacking in morals and self respect as I have

always believed—why I'm afraid I could look upon it as nothing but mere confirmation

of the very worst those Yankees have ever said about us."

On the porch that afternoon, looking a little foolish with two going-away bags in his hands, he again tried to persuade her that their relationship was perfectly innocent. He had never even admitted there was anything like the kind of relationship she had suspected. But he had about given up his attempt to persuade her of anything. After all the talk he knew it would be useless trying to say anything in his defense.

If his mother had not actually gone mad she nevertheless possessed some of the excellent qualities of madness. She had always been able to spot a lie almost before it was out of his mouth; and she had guessed exactly what was in Deni's letter even before she opened it, yes, no doubt about it, “by mistake.”

In her state of crazy anxiety he was afraid she would take it upon herself to warn Deni’s mother and stepfather that their daughter was forsaking a promising academic career not simply to go vacationing down South with her brother—perhaps even to take a job there—but to renew a “relationship” that would create wholesale havoc and scandal in their family and become the talk of generations yet unborn.

Although his mother had guessed at their secret affair, she was in no shape to be taken seriously by anyone. How much anyone else knew in those first days was far from certain. Only that there was a lot of gossip going around. Mostly in the Baptist Church, which is where one would expect most of it to originate.

From what Deni told him in her letter her mother suspected nothing. Nor had his own father [and hers as well] or any of their aunts suspected a crime of so high an order.

And if they did? Well, they were not exactly the sort to wail themselves into a

state of nervous prostration over something beyond their control.

Except perhaps for Aunt Sally, a spinster who still occupied the old family homeplace out at Dobbs Station and had been a devout Baptist all her life. As for Aunt Ethel, who doted on Deni, and Aunt Esther or Aunt Julia and even Aunt Marlene, who had married his mother’s only brother; well, they would never have believed such a thing even if a judge had presented them with affidavits.

Of them all, Aunt Alicia, with her own dubious past forever haunting her, was the least likely to have dwelled inconsolably over the affair. She was famous as the worst housekeeper in the family, a real slob though she had come from a good family, had read books and wrote poetry and was unquestionably the loveliest of his grandfather’s six daughters.

A shame, his mother always said, a real shame Alicia lacked the get-up-and-go to seek redemption for her street-walking days and keep a decent house for herself as well as for her son on those rare occasions when he deigned to pay her a visit. And to think that a girl with Deni’s upbringing could turn out to be so much less faithful to the scriptures even than her own sister Alicia.

However much she knew or how little, his mother would never think of Deni as anything more than a disreputable renegade, a vagabond, a dirty little tart with bad blood that came down, almost certainly, from the Cherokee squaw one of his father's forebears married in the late nineteenth century, probably about the time he had permitted some drunken Medicine Man or witch doctor to decorate his body with all those loathsome tattoos.

"I certainly know of no other way to describe that kind of girl even if she is your own blood kin," his mother told him once, after she got a little too deeply into her tranquilizers. And him so deep into them he did not even bother to answer.

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